COMMUNITY COMMENT: Center can offer help to lift parents' skills

Failing families. Domestic Violence. Substance abuse. Dysfunctional employees. 'Tis always the season for hand wringing and worry, but we tend to feel it more in December. This month, there's a serious need for parental capacity building.

"Capacity Building" is the trendy term for dedicating an organization to work for improved performance through training, incentives and other methods. The last 12 years of my professional and community work prove that many parents need serious capacity building to ensure the Tri-State does not devolve to Gotham City. To be pointed: parents produce children and parents-as-manufacturers need better capacity.

Still, I am an optimist. My experience has been that every person in the Tri-State has a stake in improving parent-child outcomes. Name a parent who had an ugly divorce or has an addiction. Didn't take long, did it? These parents need extra support in the capacity of child-rearing. Some admit it. Many do not. Some know where to get it. Many do not.

Still, every business owner, civic leader, teacher, minister, law enforcer and taxpayer is affected in terms of workforce, public safety and pocketbook by the lack of capacity parents have to function, maintain order and keep their children safe. It might be your daughter's or nephew's family. It might be your major client's or your payroll clerk's family. It might be the mother in the front pew or the father in the emergency room again. Parenting matters to your pocketbook and your heart.

Evansville and Vanderburgh County taxpayers pay on average $100 every time law enforcement makes a domestic disturbance run. There were 6,400 of these in 2011: $640,000 at a minimum. Plus cost for victim assistance, processing the offender and prosecution. Research on domestic violence and the workplace shows the abuse often interferes at the office. Nearly 20 million U.S. women will lose their jobs at some point because of absenteeism caused by domestic violence or at-work harassment by their abuser. Ask an employer how that affects productivity and morale.

Parental capacity building will reduce tax and productivity costs. This means offering parents training if they did not get it growing up, creating meaningful incentives for better parenting, and showing parents how to manage inter-parent anger, communication and duties. Safety and security for children will result.

The Parenting Time Center (PTC) offers much of this "capacity building" for parents. The not-for-profit PTC helps parents improve upon a bad set of circumstance by allowing children to build a better relationship with their noncustodial parent. Parent-child relationships dissolve for many reasons — drugs, domestic violence, immaturity, mental illness. The PTC works to build a child's capacity to communicate and re-establish, or perhaps disestablish, with a parent in a healthy way. This builds capacity for kids to be healthy adults.

The PTC is not crisis intervention. It does not take sides, or exert punitive or forced change. It offers several den-like rooms stocked with books and toys, for supervised, fair, calm parent-child visits. The PTC also offers safe exchanges for custodial visits, sparing children trauma at the start or end of a weekend with Mom or Dad. The PTC offers a way for each parent, or extended family, to begin next steps in parenting, and involves the child in that transition.

Our community's capacity to produce well-socialized children determines our future. All children deserve good memories of their parents. Children deserve to interact and form calm opinions about their parents. Children and victims of domestic harassment, abuse, mental illness and estrangement deserve to heal.

In 2013, you will have or see a need for supervised parenting time or child exchanges. You will want, or see a parent or child who needs, the fighting to stop or to re-establish trust. Resolve to learn more about supervised visitation and safe exchanges. Learn about the Parenting Time Center. Build on the capacity to improve the outcome for a child and for us all.

Ann M. Ennis is Department of Metropolitan Development Safe Havens Grant Coordinator. The Parenting Time Center, 101 NW 10th St., can be reached at 812-759-1543 or at www.parentingtimecenter.org.